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Comment by Stephanie on October 4, 2015 at 10:16pm

I stumbled upon this group and it's the only thing I've been grateful for since my soul mate died in June at 33 years old after 13 years together. I'm in hell, I cry every day...i felt so alone, until I found this group. I'm sorry for all our losses...

Comment by JaneS on September 27, 2015 at 3:24am

Thanks, Rachel. It means a lot to me.

Comment by rachel_micele on September 27, 2015 at 12:42am

Hi JaneS. I am here, helping you not be alone. As you know, I don't qualify for someone who has lost their love for some time. I don't feel near as strong as you are. Your words to me have meant a lot, like a beacon far off in the distance. I wish I knew the words to say to you. I'm so sorry for this bitch of a time you have coming up. And to have big losses in a short amount of time.

That's sad to hear what your father said regarding the crying with the loss of your mother.

I know you are strong but I am here if I can be of any help.

And Sherra - I am sooo sorry. You are fresh into the throws of this nightmare. And yes, that's exactly how it felt to me, like a bad dream you just don't wake up from.

Comment by Sherra on September 26, 2015 at 10:47pm

I finally said goodbye this week to the love of my life after a month in ICU and then 14 days in hospice off life support. I am so sad and I feel like I cannot go on without him. I am so devastated it feels like a bad dream. I wake up every night and think he's still here. I don't know how to do this I really don't. I don't think anyone that goes through this does, but some handle their shit I don't know if I can. He was everything to me for years and now I have nothing!!!

Comment by JaneS on September 26, 2015 at 4:23pm

I'm coming up on the first year anniversary, and I'm finding myself becoming an emotional mess. Next Friday is the first year anniversary that Tom and I walked into the ER--and seven weeks later we entered the hospice. He died eight hours later.

I'm doing all of this pretty much on my own. I don't have close family. Like the last 10 months, it's just doing it because I have no choice. That's all I can do.

I have days (2-3-4) that I don't lose it. In the last week or so, I don't have a day that I don't lose it (always on my own--even at work) that I'm now not losing it.

I need to hear from someone who's lost their soul mate--best friend--husband or wife of some time to help me. I will survive this. I have no choice, but because I have no close friends or family, I need to hear how you dealt with it, how you survived it. I've lost a mom, a sister, a best friend of decades, had no close family, lost my father which I'd adored but when he was dying, I realized how "throw-away" we had always been, but, luckily, by then, I had Tom, who kept me together.

I was devastated by the loss of my mother, but my father immediately said, "Don't you cry. Don't you dare cry," and I never did in front of anyone else. That's how I lived my life, but that's not right.

I lost my mom on Nov. 16, my girlfriend on the 18th (a year to the day after we buried my father), and Tom on the 20th. This is not going to be an easy time. Please write. Please help me know I'm not alone--at least on this site. This is going to be a "real bitch" of a time for me.

Comment by JaneS on September 19, 2015 at 5:28pm

I’ve got to tell you that for all that I might be out here feeling strong, able to tell you what I’ve done, I'm within two weeks of the first anniversary that Tom and I were heading into the hospital for our last seven very bitter-sweet weeks together. I was told, long before he actually took it in, although doctors tried to tell him sweetly, that he was dying.  “Close your affairs,” “Talk to the people who mean something to you.” I got it four weeks out. He didn’t understand it, buy into it,  until his immunologist—who’d signed out of his case until this day—came back with note after note, all individually punctuated with “and you’re going to die.” And he did. But that is when he finally got "it."

It’s been a very rough year. I’ve met a guy on the Internet, someone from a different country who has been through this before me, and I’ve been happier since we met than I was before. But a few days ago it happened again. I wasn’t thinking about anything—okay, I was pumping gas at one of Tom’s gas stations, not one of my own since he went east and I went west each morning. But then, bang, I’m just pumping gas and the tears began to flow. After meeting this English penpal widower, I don’t cry as often, not nearly so deeply, but all of a sudden it was as deep and as crippling as it had ever been. Yes, this widower in England had eased my pain, but all of my pain still exists. Four days later, I’m finally feeling better—not where I would have been months ago, but it still happens.

I have no advice to anyone to tell you how to get through this. I’m as blind as all of you on this. Just plow forward. That’s all any of us has left for us to do. Just keep living your life. That’s all I can do. Just plough through this crap. Blindly, I know, there is something on the other side. What it is, I don’t know, but I know it’s better than just dissolving here, on this wrong side.

Comment by JaneS on September 7, 2015 at 8:58am

Rachel,

I totally understand what you're saying. Being so hurt and feeling like having lost Gary gives you know compass. And you do need to grieve--to some degree you will for the rest of your life. I'm glad you are allowing yourself that and are nurturing yourself. Through all my losses, I've been there, felt that. You're doing the right things. But I've also realized, after a few big losses, that until I just started moving forward, it didn't change my grief. I wasn't sorting it out, just staying still and my "condition" didn't change. I learned that by moving forward--just moving forward--helped. I stumbled often, taking almost as many steps backwards as I did forward, blindly forward at first. But I was most successful in changing my condition when I did that. The whole paths thing and course correction thing, that's what I did and, for lack of having anything else I could think of, I learned I felt better for doing it than I did before with losses that took so much longer to get "past."

As I said, you never really get past them, you just learn to live with them--and I mean create another life for yourself. You'll always grieve, always miss them, but you'll find other purpose, and another love. He won't be the same, but he'll get into your heart in his own space, a different space, that is just his, and Gary will always be in your heart in his own space.

Just begin. They say if you aren't going forward then you're going backwards. That's the phrase that stuck in my head and why I decided to plunge ahead (on my hands and knees sometimes--or so it felt).

You're doing good, even if it feels horrible. It is horrible, what has happened to us. The very worst thing. But you're handling it well. Just keep going and it gets better--and eventually it will be good again. Bless you.

Comment by rachel_micele on September 6, 2015 at 11:22pm

Hello again JaneS,

"We’ll find times when we’ll make course corrections, but haven’t we done that before?" True. That made me think of a comment in a book called "Back to Life: Your personal guidebook to grief recovery". It said we managed before our love came into our life and we will manage again. Although I can definitely say that is not true in any way regarding Gary and what we had together, it did help in a very vague and general place to start somewhere when I thought about relationships prior to Gary. Least that felt slightly better in the clueless, bleak, absolute, miserable nothing.

But I think I like your wording better using course corrections, directions, and paths. I can relate to that thinking about college, as I'm currently back for the 3rd time. So this concept of continual changes in direction has been my life for the last 17+ years. It's been exhausting. That's what makes Gary's loss so devastating. He was finally the one. I felt finally on the path to get somewhere with him by my side and us going together. His potential, my potential, and our potential together was so full and rich. I saw it, felt it, was anxious and beyond ready for it. So without him ... I can only stand frozen in time with a lifeless, blank stare at that path obliterated not believing what I'm seeing. I don't know why but ever since being a teenager I've felt for me to achieve success and something I wanted to do with my life would take a romantic love walking with me. So that is another aspect being painfully confronted in his loss.  

But you're right, it's finding/carving out that meaning, direction, path, something so central to our core. I guess part of that too is trusting they are there and will be found. Was just thinking the other day how some say, "one day at a time" or "do the next thing". For me that's not enough, not even close. So distantly, inconsolably superficial. All your points of what is required: patience, doggedly determined, open-minded, not giving up, all good and I can see important parts. I feel focused at patience. Patience to listen to myself and give myself whatever time and nurture I need. I'm still in shock, still just trying to figure out how to survive. I don't know what to do. And I don't mean that in a literal daily thing, as those prior platitudes suggest, but in the most surreal way of existence.

I guess the one thing I can trust is feeling. To feel the grief. This being my first experience with grief, period, and how my life has been to this point, I find it hard to trust the new path is there and will be found. (Which is why I so appreciate your posts as someone who has been through some version of this before). But I feel I can trust the act of feeling and to continually connect with my grief feels better than not.

Comment by JaneS on September 2, 2015 at 7:23am

Rachel,

Finding a direction—even just the drive to find one when you’ve lost the person who was so much a part of you and your “previous” direction—I’m still fighting to find that myself. I don’t have any “wonderful nuggets of golden wisdom” that I can give you on the fly. If I had them to give you, I’d be giving them to me. All I know is that time, time is the thing that will help. With time, we’ll find ways to live with our losses in (slightly) less painful ways; time will allow us to stumble and find our new directions that give meaning to us. We have to stay open to realizing that our new directions won’t be on the same paths we used to have, those that were so comfortable and that our lost loves walked with us. But we will find new paths, ones we stumble across or cut for ourselves, and they, too, will become familiar and more and more comfortable, and we will find someone else walking on our paths, and life goes on. It’s just that darn waiting on time—its hard and painful but its doable.

I can’t point at one direction and say, “You have to go there—there’s your path.” The best I can say is to hold your arms out in front of you, your hands wide apart. All I can say to you is “go in that direction”—a very broad direction, but it’s forward. I use that image for myself, constantly. There is no right or wrong single direction, although as we stumble, and we are stumbling now and will for a while, eventually we stop stumbling and find our new paths. We’ll find times when we’ll make course corrections, but haven’t we done that before? We’ll find our new paths. They are there—in front of us, and we’ll find them.

Like I said to Sherra, none of us are omnipotent. I certainly don’t have the answers. I’m in this lost area as deeply as you are. I just know that somewhere, within that broad direction in front of us, we will find our new directions.

And, as much as I can’t tell you exactly how to get there, I do know this is how it works. It sucks for us that it is so uncertain, so painful, but I do know that if we don’t give up, we’ll each find our new paths, our new meaningful directions, find new loves, to bring us a warmth and we will be able to love and coexist with our “old” loves and our “new” loves together taking nothing away, one from the other or from us.

We just need to be patient, strong, doggedly determined, and open-minded. There are multiple great paths out there for all of us. Be open-minded to recognizing them. While we all long to be on our old paths, we can't go back. That path has changed into something we don't recognize anymore. It's a new path now and if it's not working for us, we need to find another that does. We will--you will. I will. Sherra will. It just takes time.

Comment by JaneS on September 2, 2015 at 7:12am

Sherra,

I definitely have one instant knee-jerk suggestion for you to think about. As much as you are hurting, and my guess is that you are most certainly hurting more than the family is, perhaps (me trying to think glass half full) is that they, too, don’t know how to deal with this, that they are feeling “guilty” about how they might have last treated him, for their not being there and able to “play God,” and are just taking it out on you because they feel so badly about his loss, their not being all they could have been. That is a possibility—I try, but am not always able to see the truth, but that is what I want to see, and I hope, for you, that is the case.

But if you truly feel that they are blaming you—forget them. You aren’t responsible for making them like and respect you, and you have earned the respect you deserve not through them but because your husband loved you—and who knew better how wonderful and worthy you were of his love! Do not let yourself feel the brunt of their negative feelings. Give yourself a break. You’re going through enough already. You have no reason to feel guilt (brought on by yourself or the family) because aren’t omnipotent and weren’t able to saved your husband when God/time/health/whatever came together in the horrific “perfect storm” that took him away from you. You were not responsible for his death, were not responsible or humanly able to save him, especially when NO ONE ELSE could have. Do not let that thought hang over you. Don’t even think about hanging onto it just because you feel badly that you “aren’t God.” Shit, really painful shit, just happens. And they are not your hairshirt to wear. If they don’t help you, you do NOT need them!!!

You, like the rest of us, have been thrown into a terrible place and it is not your responsibility to endure their negative feelings. LOOSE THEM. Perhaps address them as to what their feelings are—but do it as I would hope I’d be able to: openly, honestly: Are you mad at me because I’m not God or because you aren’t?” Okay, maybe don’t say it so blatantly. Tom would applaud me for being so in their face. That’s so not my style—Tom’s so “put their own feet in their own mouths, through their own words,” while I’d give them a way out to be “nice” agan. Tom taught me, “If they aren’t nice, don’t be nice yourself.” I always like to give people a “way out” when I get the courage to “address” a situation. I have to admit—it’s a plan that definitely hasn’t worked for me all the time. Just don’t blame yourself for anything and don’t allow yourself to be surrounded by their negativity.

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